[Taxacom] Wikipedia vs. science

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

Yes, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later...

Wikipedia is a very strange phenomenon; it is a privately
owned website, and users don't have any rights, except
the copyright of whatever they contribute. However, the
private owner of the website does not make any decisions
on content (at least not unless things go very, very badly
wrong), and decisions are made by 'the community', which
is an undefined entity, and which is not accountable, except
to itself. See
 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use_(2012)/en.

It is very notable that the No Original Research policy is
(still) so badly misunderstood (the average Wikipedia user
is a sloppy reader). No Original Research has nothing to do
with research, but with new thoughts / new syntheses / fiction.
( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOR )
Thus, deleting material can, by definition, never be a NOR-
violation (in fact, deleting material is often prescribed by the
Verifiability policy). A user may do any amount of research,
as long as what he/she actually adds to Wikipedia reflects
existing (and published) thoughts. Nevertheless any number
of Wikipedia users fail to accept this and misuse the term,
accusing others of NOR-violations (as here), often while
insisting on adding original thought themselves.

Paul

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen Thorpe" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
To: "TAXACOM@ MAILMAN. NHM. KU. EDU" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2012 11:48 PM
Subject: [Taxacom] Wikipedia vs. science


Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Talking *Wikipedia* here, not
*Wikispecies*. I have been blocked indefinitely from WP by an admin who
wrote on my talk page [quote]This is a private website, and there are no
"freedoms" nor "rights"[unquote] ... wow! A candid comment from another WP
admin that I know: [quote]The community has become quite toxic and a lot of
editors display self entitlement, which chased off a lot of new
editors[unquote]

All because of some sloppy (but under normal circumstances very minor)
editing of a page on WoRMS, which an idiotic WP editor insists on
neverthless using as a source for a WP article on the relevant taxon, even
though he admits that it was adding nothing but misinformation to what he
already had from other sources! The WoRMS page listed a couple of species
epithets as genera, and cited a nonexistent publication as the source for
these names (or, more precisely, the publication does exist, but in a
completely different journal to the cited journal!) At first I tried to tag
the errors on the WP article as unreliable (or even just possibly
unreliable) information, but was told that to do this was "Original
Research", and therefore not allowed. This, I could just about accept,
barely, but surely then the sensible thing to do is just to drop WoRMS as a
source for this particular WP article? If you don't mention it, then it
isn't a problem! But, no, for some
 unknown reason, that WP editor seems to "own" that article, demands to
persist with WoRMS as the source, and admins are protecting him ...

The WP editor has written that the *only* thing that he will accept as
sufficient reason to rebuke the WoRMS page is an explicit published
statement in a peer reviewed journal to the effect that the relevant names
on the current WoRMS page are a mistake! Sounds a bit "hopeful", doesn't
it???

On another article by the same WP editor, on a species of Diptera found only
in Australia, he has dragged out an archived version of a N.Z. Diptera web
checklist which has now been taken down because it was not considered to be
reliable enough. It lists the fly from N.Z., based, it turns out, on a
misidentification. The WP editor nonetheless insists on using this archived
checklist as a source for the presence of the fly in N.Z. ... wtf???

Stephen
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